The Great Fashion Designers by Brenda Polan

(1890–1973)
    Art met fashion head on in the form of Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian designer who came to fashion late and proved a breath of fresh air in a world often caught up in its own high seriousness. She was a surrealist by instinct with a playful ability to change the predictable into the unpredictable. To the surrealists, one might also add the Italian futurists, whose verve, speed and joie de vivre excited the young Schiaparelli. All this energy was encapsulated in the intense pink—shocking pink—that became her hallmark. ‘Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together … a shocking colour,’ she said with suitable hyperbole in an autobiography that shares some of the surreal characteristics of her design work.
    Even now, her best work is startlingly, thrillingly modern. Choose from the crossword-puzzle sweaters and zippered dresses, the knitted hats and costume jewellery, the culottes and jumpsuits, the experimentation with new synthetic fabrics, and, above all, the bold way with colours. Her celebrated tear dress, made from a fabric designed by Salvador Dali, created the illusion of material that had been ripped: to modern eyes, it looks thoroughly Punk in spirit. Ignorance was bliss for this untrained fashion designer. Rules were there to break, and Schiaparelli enjoyed upsetting the bourgeoisie. ‘Madame Schiaparelli trampled down everything that was commonplace,’ said Yves Saint Laurent, who dressed her and adored her. She was, said her biographer Palmer White, ‘a gifted bull in a china shop.’ Meanwhile, her arch rival, Chanel, derided her as ‘that Italian who’s making clothes.’
    Schiaparelli was from a conventional enough background, born in Rome in 1890, the daughter of Celestino, a Piedmontese intellectual who was in charge of Rome’s historic Lincei Library. Her mother, Maria Luisa, was from an aristocratic family in Naples. She spent her childhood in Rome’s Palazzo Corsini, surrounded by art and history, growing up with a surfeit of potential inspiration about her. A sensitive, shy young girl, she initially experimented with poetry and published her first book at the age of 20. The passionate subject matter shocked her father, who promptly dispatched his daughter to a convent. She in turn went on hunger strike and had to be withdrawn. In 1913, Schiaparelli visited Paris for the first time and was thrilled by the city’s energy, attending a ball dressed in a hastily concocted pair of Poiret-style pantaloons. From Paris, she travelled on to England, where she had been invited to assist at an orphanage in Kent. While visiting London, she met the French-Swiss theologian Comte William de Wendt de Kerlor, to whom she was quickly married in 1914. The marriage was a disaster and did not survive a move to New York in 1919. But it was in New York that she met Gabrielle Picabia, wife of the artist Francis Picabia, and became part of an artistic circle that included Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
    An impoverished Schiaparelli returned to Europe in 1922 with her baby daughter Yvonne (known as Gogo) and an American friend, Blanche Hays. She had no money but all the right contacts in the artistic and creative milieu of Paris. For her old friend Gabrielle Picabia, she made a gown, which drew compliments from the couturier Paul Poiret. Encouraged by this and despite her lack of expertise,she made more dresses and was further urged on by Poiret, who became both a friend and supporter. ‘Display No. 1’, produced in January 1927 and backed by French businessman M. Kahn, featured hand-knitted sweaters and matching crêpe de Chine skirts. The designs included sports, stripes and geometrical patterns, all clearly borrowed from the art movements of the time, including Art Deco, Cubism and Futurism. Her breakthrough was a butterfly bow trompe l’oeil sweater, knitted by an